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Microsoft Azure Government growth and enabling new cloud capabilities for defense customers

Today, I am in Washington, D.C. at the Microsoft Government Forum celebrating the phenomenal growth of Azure Government and announcing availability of new services and major investments in capabilities for Department of Defense (DoD) customers.

Since launch, usage of Azure Government's platform utilization has grown 40% month-over-month, among our federal, state and local, and partner customers. As I discussed last month, our deep commitments to security and industry specific compliance requirements like CJIS are unlocking innovation in the growing Justice and Public Safety sector.

The trust you have in us is evidenced by the partnerships and customer success stories we announced at the October 26 IACP Conference in Chicago, including our TASER partnership. We also announced our partnership with MorphoTrak. Building on these exciting customer wins today we are excited to share progress on our rapid pace of innovation.

Enabling cloud capabilities for Department of Defense customers

We continue to expand on Microsoft’s investment in trust and transparency and are proud to share that we will be delivering the final compliance package to DOD for the DoD’s Cloud Security Requirements Guidelines Impact Level 5 in the next few days. This makes Microsoft one of the first hyper-scale cloud providers to meet this high bar.

In order to meet the strong requirements of the Department of Defense, Microsoft is providing dedicated infrastructure for DoD-only tenants and dedicated networking through ExpressRoute to provide private transport for DoD data transiting from the DoD Information Networks to the Microsoft’s dedicated government network.

This investment means that Microsoft is providing one of the highest levels of security for a multi-tenant unclassified cloud system. We anticipate that we will soon have Level 5 Provisional Authorization for Azure Government.

Continued Azure Government progress

Azure Government continues with aggressive growth and I’m pleased to announce our continued expansion this month with ExpressRoute and Disaster Recovery.

We recently added a new ExpressRoute Meet-Me site in Chicago for Microsoft Azure Government in addition to our existing site in Washington D.C. With ExpressRoute, you can create private, high-throughput connections between Azure Government datacenters and your existing infrastructure. ExpressRoute connections don’t go over the public Internet, and they offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies, and higher security than typical connections over the Internet.

For customers wanting to set up a failover path for their existing Express Route deployments, we now support private tunnels over the Internet (site-to-site VPN) to connect with the same virtual networks as their ExpressRoute VNets – this enables customers to failover between these two private connections with no differentiation in security and providing better Disaster Recovery.

To cater to requirements for the United States public sector, ExpressRoute for Azure Government has been deployed as a physically separate and isolated instance providing predictable performance and higher throughput of ExpressRoute. Our initial partnerships include AT&T, Equinix, Level3, and Verizon. Learn more about private, dedicated connections with Azure ExpressRoute here.

Additionally, we have two new services coming in November for Azure Government, including Web Apps feature in Azure App Service that will enable you to quickly create, deploy and scale mission critical Web apps and Azure Site Recovery to quickly help protect critical applications running on your physical and virtual infrastructures and restore services quickly. Look for more on these announcements, and more in the coming month.

Looking to the future

We stand as thought leaders in the government arena, and continue building a government-community cloud you can trust. As we meet with you and listen to your requirements and feedback, I am proud that we continue to provide an unrelenting cadence of capabilities, with world-class security and compliance, enabling U.S. Government customers and partners to leverage the Microsoft Cloud.